New species of cichlid evolving

Hey all.

I just started going back to college. As part of the orientation portion we had to do a hands on with the school's online research library by finding an article about a topic that we are interested in and write a summary. So... guess what topic I picked. Anyway, I can't link the article from where I found it, but I can tell you that it was in Oct 2008 "Science News". The title was "Cichlids Divide Along Color Lines". It's a few years old, so some of you may already know about this, but I thougt this was so cool I figured I'd share.

Apparently Lake Victoria in Africa filters light differently in certain areas according to depth & quality. The shallow areas tend to be lit by blue light, and the deeper murkier areas are lit by red light. This caused evolutionary changes in the fish's eyes to the point where the region of the lake the cichlids are from determines what type of light the fish are sensitive to. That alone is pretty neat, but it goes further...

Apparently since the cichlids from the two different regions are now more sensitive to a specific colors of light, females are beginning to become unable to recognize certain colored males from the same species as potentiol mates. So the females from the red lit region are beginning to only recognize red tinted males as mates, and the females from the blue lit region are recognizing only blue tinted males as mates. This is causing the single species to begin to separate and evolve into two new species as the interbreeding between the two groups stops. They've already isolated DNA changes that are starting to separate the species into two distinct species.

So...years from now there may be 2 new species of african cichlid that scientists actually got to witness evolve first hand.

Pretty neat, huh.

 

A good example of micro-evolution and adaptation at work. Thanks for sharing

 

wow that is interesting!

 

Way cool. Gotta see if I can find that article.

 

very cool!

 

Wow that's facinating!

 

Sounds like a fascinating article! Wonder what has been learned about them since 2008.

 

Don't know. I keep meaning to try to find more info on it, but with work, family, and now school... time is tight.


Edit: at work today, so I was able to find the link to the article.

https://www.sciencenewsdigital.org/sciencenews/20081025/?pg=16#pg16

Still don't know if any more was published in relation to this though.

 

This thread makes me think of an unrelated question I have about fish.

How do schooling fish know other fish are the same species as they are. I assume fish really can't see themselves (and when they do in a refelection it seems they don't recognize themselves) so how do they know what others look like they do?

 

This thread makes me think of an unrelated question I have about fish.

How do schooling fish know other fish are the same species as they are. I assume fish really can't see themselves (and when they do in a refelection it seems they don't recognize themselves) so how do they know what others look like they do?

I think it has to do with hormones or pheromones the fish release (just a guess, don't count me on it!). The Mexican Tetras (their are two, the Blind Cave Tetras, and the Mexican's, both the same fish, just with and with out eyes) school together. I'll have to find that article....

This isn't the article I was looking for, but its better in most ways lol It doesn't say in this one that they school together, but I;ve seen it a few different places